Wednesday, October 07, 2009

The Gnostics, 1987

I blogged yesterday on an old Youtube video about the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices. The video features James Robinson, Gilles Quispel, Elaine Pagels and Muhammad Ali, the man who discovered the codices. At that point, I was unsure about the origin of the video and guessed that it dated from the early 1980s. Some further research has yielded some more information, and I can see now why I was hitting a brick wall before. I worked out that the series was called The Gnostics from a notice in Alexandria: The Journal of Western Cosmological Traditions 1995, 459, in its "Books in Brief" section, where it describes the series from which the clip had to have been taken. But it erroneously gives it as a BBC series, and that threw me off.

A trip to the British Film Institute archive reveals that this was a Channel 4 series which aired in four parts in 1987, and that it was made by Border. So my guess about the dating was in the ball park but, as so often with dating guesses, it was a little too early.

A comment on my previous post from Brent helped to confirm the identification. See too the discussion on the Gospel of Thomas e-list.